Authors: Vanina Marsot
Foreign Tongue (7 page)
A
few pages into
chapitre deux,
I came to the conclusion that I hadn’t needed to buy a dictionary of slang for this project. I needed a medical textbook. For every word I knew (
“frenulum,” “vagin”
), there were others I hadn’t heard before, accompanied by descriptions of such scientific rigor that I began to wonder if the author wasn’t either a doctor or a humorless obsessive-compulsive.
“Why settle for one?” Bunny asked when I told him on the phone. “Let’s assume he’s a humorless, obsessive-compulsive oncologist, specializing in colorectal cancer. And let’s call him Heinz. I once had a terrible doctor in Munich named Heinz. Never get a colonoscopy. I’m sure dying is better.”
“But he’s French,” I protested. “What are you up to?”
“Waiting for pizza from Speed Rabbit. They deliver it on farty little mopeds,” he said. “You gonna read me something, or do I have to watch the porn channel to get a thrill tonight?”
I gave a long-suffering sigh.
“And don’t take that long-suffering tone with me, young lady. Canal Hot is showing
Paula and the Randy Martians
in half an hour,” he added.
“Okay, okay.” I skimmed the next page. “Oh,” I said.
“What?”
“It turns into a childhood memory. Apparently his father was a gynecologist, and he used to sneak into his office and pore over his medical textbooks, copy out the racy words. It’s kind of sweet,” I admitted. Bunny’s intercom honked.
“That’s the door,” he said. “Call me later.”
I found a website with a medical dictionary, looked up the words, and typed.
I copied the terms into a notebook, as if having them in my own hand was some kind of erotic communion. Ah, the pleasure of words! They were magic, conjurations and conjugations from the mysterious world of adults. Of course, the pictures helped. There was one book in particular, from the nineteenth century, with detailed engravings and faded colors. Multichambered, more intricate than a nautilus, a woman’s anatomy was so complex. It was hard to imagine how everything fit inside…
A couple of pages on the vagina, uterus, fallopian tubes, and ovaries (
like flowers on stalks of fallopian tubes
—ugh) followed. I skipped ahead.
My first great love was Madame Ronet. She looked like the angel in my catechism book. My schoolmate Raymond’s mother, she wore her thin platinum blond hair in a small chignon and painted her lips a bright red. Her curvaceous body and tiny waist, wrapped in tight-fitting suits, made me think of a fist squeezing a tube of toothpaste. When she ruffled my hair, I suffered alarming aches. The fact that
she was one of my father’s patients gave us a special bond, I felt. Once I stayed home from school feigning illness because I knew she had an appointment. After she left, I crept into the downstairs examination room and pressed the used cotton sheet to my face before Martine, my father’s nurse, could clean up. It smelled of tuberose and sweat.
“You must watch out for my little Raymond,” Madame Ronet told me. “He’s not as clever as you.”
It was true: Raymond was a boring little runt, whose principal interests were burning bugs with his magnifying glass and knowing facts about dinosaurs. But I did keep an eye out for him, even befriending him, because she’d asked me to. For my trouble, I was invited to the Ronets’ country house for a weekend.
It was a damp, miserable cottage in Normandy, set on a grim stretch of local highway. Monsieur Ronet, a tense, burly fellow with a handlebar mustache, took us out for a long walk—“an airing,” he said—then put us to work repairing a stone wall. At dinner, Madame Ronet served pumpkin soup and a gristly beef stew. We listened to a giant radio, shaped like a church window, while Madame mended socks with a darning egg. Later, she tucked us in bed.
The distinct crawl of insect feet across my forehead woke me up at night. Without thinking, I smacked my hand down, killing it with an audible crunch. I panicked when I felt a sticky pulp on my hand, and I ran down the hallway, colliding with Madame. She was dressed for bed, in a clingy nightgown under her open dressing gown, her hair in curlers under a threadbare red scarf.
“How horrible!” she exclaimed, blanching at the squashed insect carapace stuck to my forehead. She led me into the bathroom and cleaned my face. Afterward, while she heated a saucepan of milk and vanilla, I sat at the kitchen table, dangling my feet, mute with joy at being alone with her at last.
“There,” she said, placing a cup in front of me. I blew on the surface, a fine pucker of milk skin already beginning to form. “My poor
little man,” she said, stroking my face, “poor little Jean-Marc.” I gave a theatrical sob, biting my lip to keep from laughing. It had the desired effect. She pulled me onto her lap and held me close to her chest. My nose was squashed flat against her nightgown, pressed right into the hollow between her breasts. “There, there. You’ll be able to sleep now.”
Not likely. I couldn’t breathe.
It was the happiest memory of my childhood.
I was eleven.
The next few pages covered the author’s adolescence, including a high school sweetheart and a brief affair with one of his father’s nurses. The language was straightforward, factual. Then the narrative returned to its main subject.
Is there anything more compelling than the pursuit of a woman? All I could think of was Eve. The facts and routine of daily life were just a stopgap, a bookmark, a pause between notes, background noise. I lived through my senses. Information did not get processed through my brain; instead, I felt it on my skin, tasted it with my tongue, and caressed it with my fingertips. After an escalating campaign of phone calls, flowers, and lunches, Eve and I began an affair.
We met at noon, in the late afternoon, sometimes on weekends, but always at the same sparsely furnished apartment near the place de Clichy. We made love, ate, made love again. We didn’t discuss jobs or friends or obligations, how we filled up the day until we saw each other. We kept ourselves free from the mundane details that dull most affairs. Instead, we talked about our childhoods, favorite books, memories. The time I spent with her was enchanted, and she’d agreed to a weekend in Venice with me later that month.
The first weekend in October hosted the most important horse race in France, the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe. Daphne and I went with
my cousin Yves, a sports journalist. He’d finagled us an invitation to a cocktail party at the loge of a wealthy Brit. Neither Daphne nor I knew anything about racing, so we drank champagne and soaked up information from the horse world cognoscenti.
Extravagant hats were traditional, so Daphne wore a wide-brimmed straw confection covered in plumage. It resembled nothing so much as an unidentified flying object after an infelicitous encounter with a chicken coop. She was more interested in examining other hats through her mother-of-pearl opera glasses than the horses.
Between races, we visited the paddock. The horses were magnificent, glossy, high-strung creatures. They knew they were about to run, and they twitched and pranced with anticipation. I angled my face beneath her hat and nuzzled Daphne’s neck. Her skin was cloying and sweet with tea roses. A chestnut stallion picked his way around the ring, placing each hoof as if he were tracing a dance step. A tremor of excitement rippled through the spectators. I placed a hand on Daphne’s hip and scanned the crowd, idly wondering if a familiar face would emerge.
It was Daphne who spotted her. “That woman is very elegant,” she said, nudging me. I followed her gaze.
Eve wore dark glasses and an ivory suit, a black fox wrap draped over her shoulder. A small, veiled hat sat on her head at an angle. She stood next to a gray-haired man, her arm linked through his. My cousin mistook the object of my scrutiny.
“Not as old as he looks in the papers,” Yves commented, tilting his head toward Eve’s companion. It was Eric Beaufort de Blois, an industrialist who’d made a fortune in petrochemicals. “He got into horses about five years ago. Partnered with a Saudi prince and an Indian pharmaceuticals magnate. That’s their horse in the next race.”
“Who’s the woman?” I muttered, trying to catch Eve’s eye.
“Girlfriend, mistress, whore.” He shrugged. “He’s always photographed with different women.”
So this was why she never mentioned a job, why she never went elsewhere, why there were never any questions about Daphne.
“Why are you staring at her?” Daphne hissed. At that moment, Eve saw me, and widened her eyes at the sight of Daphne’s hat. She slid her sunglasses back on her face, a small smile playing on her lips. Beaufort caressed her cheek.
“I’m not staring at her,” I said, turning to face Daphne.
“You were,” she retorted.
“You’re paranoid. I was staring at him,” I lied. “He turned me down for an interview two years ago. Around the time the oil refinery scandal broke.” Daphne looked uncertain. “You’re jealous?” I asked, bending under the hat to kiss her. I kissed her again until she kissed me back, hoping Eve could see. I gave Daphne a meaningful look. She darted a glance around, understanding. “Come on,” I murmured.
We sped back to the loges, and I pulled Daphne inside a private bathroom and locked the door. She laughed, breathless and dizzy on her heels. She undid my fly as I hiked up her skirt and lifted her, placing her ass on the edge of the sink. She wore a lace-edged garter belt and stockings, and it was easy to rip off her panties. She wrapped her legs around my hips as I plunged into her. Daphne was wet and she was hot, but as I thrust into her, I thought of Eve, the fur draped over her shoulder, the sly smile on her face. She moaned and I slid my tongue into her mouth—it was Daphne’s mouth, I insisted to myself, it was Daphne I was fucking—but I could see only Eve’s face as I came…
Asshole! Bastard! My fingernails clacked across the keyboard as I translated, despising the man who seemed to revel in his infidelity to the hapless Daphne even as he was fucking her. Granted, Daphne was about as perceptive as a veal, but this only made me dislike him more. I was, perhaps, just maybe, overidentifying with the veal, but that was beside the point. I called Bunny back.
“It’s me. Why do men cheat?” I asked, terse.
“Why are you asking me?”
“’Cause you’re a man. Give me a reason.” There was a loud yawn, then silence on the other end. “Are you stalling?” I asked.
“Jesus, you’re serious! Let me guess, you’ve been thinking about what’s-his-face again. Let it go.” His voice was scratchy.
“No, I’m translating this stupid chapter, and he’s cheating on the veal with the femme fatale while still sleeping with the veal, and it’s got disaster written all over it, and I just want to know
why
!”
“I’m not going to defend my whole gender—”
“Did you? I mean, did you ever—”
“I know what you mean, and that’s none of your business. You might consider whether life with the veal isn’t making him miserable and if the femme fatale isn’t adding some excitement to his stagnant existence. We can continue this conversation when you dismount the high horse,” he said.
“Damn it, whose side are you on?” I yelled, but he hung up. I stared at the receiver, bleating in frustration. Sheep, not veal, but close enough.
Of course, Bunny had a point. Bunny always had a point, but like a lot of points, sometimes it hurt when he used it. It would be easier to translate if I kept myself out of it, but it was hard to keep myself out of it since I was doing the translating. It seemed an unfair metaphysical joke that
this
story would be the one I got to translate.
I put water on to boil and searched the kitchen cupboards for something sweet. I found an open package of petit-beurre biscuits and pressed a soft, stale cookie to the roof of my mouth. Maybe Bunny was right. Maybe the narrator’s relationship with Daphne was over. Maybe this was his way of getting out of it. Maybe there was always someone else. Maybe, as the cynical saying went, it took three to make a perfect relationship.
Or maybe there wasn’t a reason. Maybe the world was random and mean and hurtful, and maybe sometimes people were, too. Maybe there
wasn’t a
reason
Timothy had cheated on me. Maybe someone he couldn’t resist had come along. Someone like Eve.
Maybe I could be more like Eve, I mused, peering out the window and trying to picture myself as the exotic, mysterious, sexy woman. I thought about Olivier, then shook my head. I’d probably never see him again. I poured myself a mug of tea and retreated under the duvet.
I woke up later that night thinking about clothes: Eve’s fur, Daphne’s hat and lingerie, Madame Ronet’s tight-fitting navy suits. There was an awful lot of attention to detail. The kind of detail women tended to notice more than men.
Could the author be a woman?
Irène: J’hésite entre une gauffre au sucre et une histoire d’amour..
Une vieille dame: Ben, prenez une gauffre!.
Irène: Ben, une gauffre au sucre..
Le cuisinier: Beaucoup de sucre?.
Irène (en soupirant): Ah, oui.
*
—
GILLES PORTE AND YOLANDE MOREAU,
Quand la mer monte
I
toyed with the idea over the next few days, but by Wednesday morning, as I reread the chapter, I decided it didn’t read as particularly female, though the descriptions of the clothes struck me as feminine. But maybe that was because I paid more attention to them. Besides, observing sartorial details was normal for a French man. A woman author was a nice theory, but I let it go. I’d heard a rumor once about
Story of O
: that Pauline Réage had written it to win back a lover who’d left her. Appar
ently, it had worked: he came back, and she never wrote another piece of fiction. Which was one definition of a happy ending.
I fiddled around with the passage:
There was a private bathroom by the loges. I pulled Daphne inside and fumbled with the lock as she laughed, the porcelain perfection of her face creased with mirth. She grabbed my belt and deftly undid the fly, her fingers reaching for me as she sucked my lips. I grabbed handfuls of her silk skirt and lifted her onto the edge of the sink. Daphne spent a fortune on expensive lingerie; today she was wearing a pale pink lace garter belt and sheer black stockings. I ran my fingers over the short expanse of exposed bare thigh and hooked a thumb under the thin waistband of the lace panties. She gasped when I ripped them off, and wrapped her legs around my hips. I plunged into her. Daphne was wet and she was hot, but as I thrust into her, I thought of Eve, the thick, lush fur draped over her shoulder, the sly smile on her face. I howled and slid my tongue into Daphne’s mouth—it was Daphne’s mouth, I insisted to myself, it was Daphne’s cunt—but it was Eve’s face I saw as I came…
I went back and forth over “cunt,” leaving it out, putting it back in, considering “pussy,” trying out the more genteel “fucking,” dithering over degrees. The irony of considering “fucking” more genteel than “cunt” wasn’t lost on me. It was tricky territory, trying to figure out which words were more accurate. Err on the side of accuracy or mood? I couldn’t get both to work. Today, translating felt like endless compromise, each version tipping the scales in a different, wrong direction.
Perhaps I was overthinking the nuances of profanity. I’d learned most of my French swearwords from my roommate, back when I’d lived in Paris after college. A lesbian with a Tintin haircut, she wore steel-toed boots, smoked three packs of Marlboro Reds a day, and had the foulest mouth I’d ever heard in French. She’d told me the hardness of
words in French didn’t translate directly to a similar hardness in English. “Asshole” is a fairly strong insult;
“trou du cul”
is something one eight-year-old calls another for knocking over his sand castle.
I left “cunt” in and printed the chapter out. On the radio, the news predicted clouds. I picked at the loose threads of my bathrobe and looked at my underwear drawer. It was a sea of sensible white cotton, most of it gone gray, plus some beige and black. Nothing that could be ripped off without causing severe friction burns; ergo, nothing conducive to quickies in bathrooms. I called Laveau and left a message that I’d bring the translation later that afternoon. Then I called Clara. After her summer vacation in Corsica, she’d gone on a quick buying trip to India to source precious stones for her jewelry collection. I invited myself over.
I walked to her place in the Ninth, a high-ceilinged apartment with plump sofas and damask walls covered in artwork she’d collected from around the world. A gilt Buddha looked down on the living room from its elevated perch.
“Ça tombe bien,”
she said when I got there. “I need you to try on some rings so I can see how they look like on another pair of hands. Would you like some mint tea?”
“Yes, please,” I said. Her apartment smelled of beeswax and flowers. “Nice,” I said, stopping to sniff a bouquet of peach and pink roses.
“Mmm,” she hummed in a happy voice. “He knows how to apologize.”
I followed her down the hallway to her workroom and stopped in front of a drying rack laden with lingerie. “Don’t look!” she exclaimed. “It’s such a mess, but there’s nowhere else to put them!”
“No, this is an excellent coincidence. I was going to ask you where to buy nice underwear. Do you mind?” I asked. She shook her head. I looked at a pale green silk chiffon
balconnet
bra overlaid with red and pink lace and a matching G-string; a boned blue satin and lace bra with cups shaped like shells and attached with thin ribbons; even her plainest beige bra was draped in eggshell soutache embroidery.
“These are beautiful,” I said, impressed and seized with a sudden desire for my own collection of extravagant underthings.
“It’s an addiction,
lingerie,”
Clara admitted. I fingered a pair of yellow silk panties with red tulips, then put them down.
“Wait, you have to hand-wash all this, don’t you?” I asked.
“
Bien sûr!
You can’t throw lace and silk into a washing machine,” she said, adamant. This was a big strike against a potential purchase. Hand-washing was way too labor-intensive.
Another thought occurred to me. “Do you always match? I mean,” I said, looking at a white eyelet ensemble, “what do you do if you’re wearing a white top and black pants?” It was a serious question, but she thought I was poking fun.
“Ah, the metaphysical problems of the world,” she mocked.
“Clara, I’m serious.”
“You’re impossible.” She repositioned a black and lilac bra on the rack.
“No, really. All my underwear is white, beige, or black. None of it matches, except by accident. What do you do?”
Clara cocked her head. “You can always wear beige, though sometimes,
ce n’est pas evident,
” she said. Even though I know the phrase means “it’s not easy,” I always hear “there is no obvious solution.”
“How much does this stuff cost?” I knew it was a gauche question on two counts, direct and about money, but I needed to be fully informed before I decided to be a total cheapskate.
“Ouf! Une fortune,”
she exclaimed, puffing her cheeks and letting out an airy raspberry of exasperation. It made her look like a disgruntled chipmunk.
“Humor me,” I cajoled.
“About two hundred euros for a nice set,” she admitted. I did the math.
“You have over three thousand dollars’ worth of lingerie drying on this rack!” I squealed.
“Do I ask how you spend your money?” She raised an eyebrow.
“No, but—”
“It’s tough being a woman, no?”
Clara opened intricately folded pieces of paper, showing me the spoils of her trip: pink citrines, yellow diamonds, magenta rubies, and multicolored tourmalines. I modeled rings for her, and she took pictures of my hands with her digital camera. When the sun came out, we went for a walk on the rue des Martyrs.
“You surround yourself with beauty,” I remarked, thinking of her lingerie but also her jewelry, her furniture, the framed watercolors and engravings on the walls.
“Don’t you?” she asked.
“I used to acquire a lot of things, but I don’t actually live in them. I bring them out for special occasions,” I said, thinking of my closet in L.A., crammed with dressy clothes and expensive shoes I rarely wore, and the trunk with my grandmother’s monogrammed linen sheets and embroidered tablecloths, which I never used.
“That’s stupid. Why do you buy things if you don’t enjoy them?”
“You’re right, it’s stupid. But I keep thinking my life is on hold. One day, I’ll have a use for those things when I hit the Play button again,” I said, musing out loud.
“But then you would have to put Timothy behind you, and you’re not done suffering over him,” she remarked.
“Ouch,” I said, frowning at her.
“I’m sorry.
Ne m’en veux pas,
” she apologized.
“Do you really think that’s what I’m doing?” I asked, suspecting she was right and embarrassed that she knew.
“I shouldn’t have said anything.” She looked pained. “But—it’s been a couple of months. How are you supposed to get on with your life un
less you get on with it?” Clara said it kindly, but it stung. We walked in silence for a moment.
“I’d forgotten how direct you can be,” I said lightly, tucking my arm in hers to let her know I wasn’t offended. If I was honest, I could admit it felt like I’d been carrying my grief for Timothy around like a weight on my shoulders.
We walked into a park and sat on a bench. A group of chubby-cheeked children sat in a circle playing
le facteur,
the postman, the French version of duck, duck, goose, but instead of a head tap, it was played with a dropped handkerchief. One little boy started wailing, for no apparent reason, and his mother spoke to him sharply:
“Cyril! Arrête ton cinéma!”
Stop your cinema.
I love that expression. The closest equivalent in English is “drama queen,” but it doesn’t quite convey the connection to both film and illusion. Or the futile grandstanding.
“I’d been single for a long time before Timothy,” I said, thinking out loud. “And even though there were lots of things wrong with the relationship—”
“There were?” Clara interrupted. “You never talk about
that.
”
“Sure. I can see that now: I made a lot of assumptions because I was totally infatuated. I misread him, I never called him on anything because I was scared that if I did, it would end…” I trailed off. “But I can’t shake the feeling that that was it. Like now I should devote my life to saving the whales or ending child hunger.”
“You’re being ridiculous,” she said with a disapproving look.
“Maybe, but sometimes, that’s what it feels like. Other times, I think I just have to look harder.”
“Look harder, but let him come to you this time. Don’t do all the work.”
“What do you mean?”
“Cours après moi pour que je t’attrape,”
Clara said, citing an old French
proverb. Chase after me so I can catch you. “No, don’t ask me what it means.” She shook her head. “Just think about it. Come on.” We left the park and went down a narrow street.
“This will take your mind off things,” she said, stopping in front of a lingerie boutique.
“I’m not buying anything,” I said, gazing at an icy blue silk negligee.
“It’s just what you need.
Une intervention,
” she said.
“A what?”
“That’s what they called it on
Les Sopranos
.”
Clara pushed me inside and introduced me to Madame Laserre, the owner, a stick-thin woman in her fifties with a sharp nose and glossy black pageboy. Clara pointed out artful displays of bras, panties, teddies, and nightgowns, but I didn’t feel like spending money on something no one would see.
“Why are you being so puritanical?” Clara asked.
“I feel fat,” I said. Back home, this would make anyone back off.
“Et alors?
Don’t you think the fat would look better in this?” She waved an ecru silk camisole under my nose.
“Fine. But I’m just trying it on,” I said and threw my bag into the small
cabine
. Madame Laserre took one look at my bra (shapeless, a little dingy, with wide, comfortably padded straps) and triumphantly informed me I was wearing the wrong cup size. She took my measurements and came back with a taupe and cream
balconnet
bra, and insisted I bend forward and wiggle to get the breasts to settle in the cups. Performing this action under the watchful gaze of this bird-like creature made me feel about as graceful as a beached aquatic mammalian, say a walrus or a manatee. I was relieved when she left to answer the phone.
“Alors?”
asked Clara from behind the curtain. “
Puis-je voir?”
“No, you can’t. Go away,” I said. I looked in the mirror. It was the prettiest bra I’d ever worn—even the straps were gorgeous, taupe tulle
shot through with satin ribbon. The
balconnet
pushed my breasts up into a round, full shape, like in eighteenth-century paintings.
Clara poked her head in anyway. “It’s so pretty!” she exclaimed. “It’s just what you need.”
“Yes, but lots of things are really pretty. It doesn’t mean I have to buy them.”
“Et ça? T’as vu le slip?”
She held up a matching panty and garter belt. “You can choose a bikini or thong or the little boy shorts, or,
tiens,
these boring ones, what are they called?” she asked, holding them up.
“Briefs,” I said sourly. She rolled her eyes.
“Fine. Go on, be sad, you can console yourself with all those nice things tucked away in Los Angeles. No, even better, you can donate them to the hungry children.”
She let the curtain drop. I looked at myself in the mirror again and caved.
I forked over my credit card for the bra, boy shorts, and, what the hell, garter belt, and tried not to wince at the amount. Outside, Clara pinched me.
“Okay, I’m happy I bought it,” I grumbled.
“Good,” she said.
I looked at my watch. “I should run. I have to drop off the translation.”
We kissed good-bye, and I walked toward the métro. “By the way, don’t expect him to notice. They never notice,” she called out over her shoulder.
“Him? Him who?” I asked.
“Him whoever. At least you’re prepared.”